LA's housing crisis a lesson for us all

Hopelessness: Rows of tents can be seen on many Los Angeles streets.

Los Angeles is full. The famous Hollywood sign ought to be joined by another: “No Vacancy”.

The city has 46,874 homeless people – and if it does not act soon, it will have 250,000 more, experts warn.

As shocking as that number is, imagine that lined up behind each of those unsheltered human beings are five more.

That’s roughly how many more Angelenos are at high risk of imminent homelessness. Local elected officials, city and county, have committed more than $250 million to emergency housing and services for people experiencing homelessness.

Yet thousands each month end up on the street when they are evicted, exit foster care, escape domestic violence, or are released from jail.

Yet you could remove the words "Los Angeles" and replace them with many other cities around the world, from London to Auckland, even if their plight is not yet as acute.

A dire lack of affordable housing is the biggest hole in the boat.

The California Housing Partnership Corporation estimates Los Angeles needs to add 549,197 affordable homes just to meet current needs: If every seat in the Rose Bowl, Coliseum, Dodger Stadium and Staples Center were an apartment, that would be only half the housing the city needs.

Because of the housing shortage, rents have gone up 28 per cent since 2000. Over the same period, median incomes fell 8 per cent.

More than 250,000 households in Los Angeles pay 90 per cent or more of their income on rent.

If finding a decent meal is a struggle, these families are just one illness, one eviction, one car accident, or one lost job away from homelessness.

An LA Times op-ed highlights the issue thus: "People must understand a more affordable city is by necessity a denser city. Much affordable housing should and will be developed in public transit corridors and other already dense areas, but all neighbourhoods need to be part of the solution.

"We also need cities across Southern California to keep people secure in the apartments they have. In November, four Northern California cities are voting on new rent control measures. Southern California cities should consider joining this trend.

Unfair and illegal evictions happen every day and tenants also need protections like those recently passed by Santa Monica, which prohibit landlords from harassing tenants to push them into moving out.

We must also get smarter about how we prepare people about to be discharged from hospitals or prisons or who are leaving foster care.

The statistics around foster care are particularly damning. Nearly 50 percent of those leaving the foster care system will be homeless within six months.

This is a worrying and shaming trend reflected in so many "advanced" economies that have tried to dig their way out of the 2007 financial crash with brutal austerity which has undoubtedly hit younger people - those who should be forging their countries' futures – disproportionately hard. It has left them unmotivated and despairing.

Homeless on the streets of Los Angeles.

Obscenely high percentages of young people are without work across swathes of Southern Europe; others are shackled to low-paid, unreliable hours jobs, with no security.

A small number of asset-rich people are milking the system and collectively hauling up the drawbridge for the rest, perpetuating the problem.

Social unrest is the only sure outcome in the medium to long term, and Britain's vote to leave the EU was in some measure a protest against the system; about being left behind.

Housing is just one major hurdle younger people face: high rents prevent them saving for a home. They try to draw down credit from the bank of mum and dad if they are lucky. But in the US, there is a growing shadow of what is surely to spread elsewhere if affordable housing is not just a subject politicians of all stripes talk about then fail to act on.

Los Angeles and its satellites — once the land of the American homeowner dream — now form the most stunted urban region in the country.

Families have been evicted as L.A. rents have soared.

There were 28,000 new housing starts in the L.A. Metro last year (pop. 13 million), versus 64,000 in Houston (pop. 2 million).

What makes this so striking, in the case of Los Angeles city, is how much room there is. With slightly more than 8,000 people per square mile, L.A. is less than one-third as crowded as New York City and less than half as dense as San Francisco.

And yet, L.A. is much, much closer to its residential capacity than the more compact and more populous NYC.

Los Angeles has created a crisis of artificial scarcity; a burden for renters, a drain on economic growth, and an environmental disaster. The city has planned itself into a cage.

It wasn’t always this way. According to Greg Morrow, a planner and professor, Los Angeles had a residential capacity of 10 million in 1960. In the years since, that has fallen by 60 percent, as the city turned over planning responsibilities to communities.

Local control led to lower densities, larger minimum lots, parking requirements and setbacks.

In four decades of community control, poor, largely minority areas have borne the brunt of new construction. Affluent, largely white communities have effectively thrown up the gates.

“It’s planning apartheid,” Morrow said. “You have essentially a minority of a minority of a minority who determine the housing policies for the vast majority of Angelenos.”

Among U.S. cities with over 500,000 people, only New York City has a lower home-ownership rate than Los Angeles, where three in five households rent.

Little wonder there is no room at the inn.

#Housing #LosAngeles #Austerity